/Real/ first Tarot Card

So, it looks like I lied when I said that The Lovers was going to be the first card in my Tarot series… because I just finished another before it. “How did I finish another painting so quickly?” you may ask, oddly in the first-person. Well, I didn’t really. See, my wonderful and brilliant friend Jessica noticed that the painting I’d been working on of Princess Leia (an altered version of Corot’s “Wounded Eurydice“) is positioned not unlike The Empress card in the Rider-Waite deck.

It didn’t require much modifying to fit the painting to the image, so, without further ado, here’s a poorly photographed image of the first of my card paintings:

The Empress.

This painting was done entirely in oil paints, and began in 2009 as a strict copy of the Corot original which is housed in the Art Institute in Chicago. While it would have been much more effective and easier to have done it using the Mische Technique, I wasn’t using the technique when I began working on it and the original was clearly only done in oils.

I struggled to get the face accurate when I started it in 2009, and after a few months, I put the painting aside. It remained on the back-burner until sometime in 2010 when I noticed that the face could easily be substituted with Princess Leia and I quickly got to working on it again. I worked on the painting on and off between then and now. It wasn’t until about four days ago that the observation was made that it could fit in with the Tarot cards, so I added the gold frame and labels. There’s a chance that I’ll figure out something to put in the gold coin in the upper right and add it subsequently, but for now I declare it to be done.

I discussed the painting yesterday with my friend Chris, who is sort of my Tarot mentor/teacher, and he thought that the organic process in which the painting came to be the card rings true to the meaning of The Empress: a progenitrix who is linked to abundance and the act of creation. The painting sort of thused itself into being, defying the constructs that were originally determined for it (being a copy). So there you have it. It’s not quite so meaning-laden as The Lovers, but it’s… something.